"The Love of God"
Sermon Transcript for August 18, 2002
Scripture Reading: John 3:16-17
By Rev. Mike Beck
The next nine months will be a critical period in the life of Grace Church. Perhaps like the Israelites of old, we stand at the edge of the Jordan River looking over at what we believe God has for us and wondering though sometimes how and if we can get there. God has laid three messages on my heart to share today and the next two Sundays that I think in a sense are foundational for the important months that lie ahead. I want to talk today about the love of God. I want to talk next week about what happens when God’s people truly develop a hunger after God. And then on September 1st I want to speak about the joy of the Lord.
The love of God is at the heart of the Good News we proclaim as Christ’s church. But do we really believe? Do we really even begin to grasp these three simple words: God loves me. My goal in this message today can be summed up in the Apostle Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesus when he wrote, "I pray that you being rooted and grounded in love may have the power to grasp how high and wide and long and deep is the love of Christ."
This is an awesome topic to try to preach on. I decided I wanted to approach it through the back door. I want to begin by identifying some things that prevent us from realizing God’s love for us. The first one is going to seem kind of odd but I’m going to flush it out. Our self-righteousness becomes a barrier to really experiencing and understanding God’s love. That’s why in the Old Testament there is much more of an emphasis on the holiness, the wrath, and the judgment of God than we find in the New Testament. But what God is doing in the stories of the Old Testament is showing to us that God is holy and we are anything but. And if we think we can earn God’s love by our good works, we’re sadly mistaken. You see if we think somehow we’re righteous in and of ourselves, and God loves us because of that, than God’s love is kind of something we’ve earned not an awesome gift that we don’t deserve.
Cultural standards are sometimes a barrier for we live in a culture that tells us how you look, how much money you made, what you do. Those are the things that will cause other people to love you, cause you to be deserving of love. God’s love—he doesn’t care how much money you make. He doesn’t care if you are the ugliest person on the face of the earth. He doesn’t care if you’ve made a mess of your life. He still would wrap his arms of love around you and tell you how valuable you are.
Sin is a barrier to understanding God’s love. In fact in John 3:19, just a couple of verses after what we read, John says, "Light has come in to the world, but men love darkness instead of the light." Why? "…Because their deeds were evil." Un-confessed, un-repented sin creates a barrier.
A fourth barrier is a lack of faith for faith is the receiver that lets us appropriate the love of God. During the week when I’m driving in my car, I usually have on the Moody Christian station in Indianapolis, 97.9 FM. Now that frequency is right here in this sanctuary right now. The frequency on your FM dial, 97.9, is right there in the pew next to you. But to receive it you’ve got to have a radio and you’ve got to turn it on to 97.9. And if you do, you’ll pick it up. It’s the same way with God’s love. Faith is the receiver that allows us to appropriate God’s love. That’s why the writer of Hebrews says, "Without faith you’re never going to know God."
And then for some persons their life experiences create a barrier that makes it very hard for them to believe that God could love them. If they’ve had an abusive parent that’s constantly told them they were no good, they were stupid, they’d never amount to anything. If they’ve been in a marital relationship where their spouse was abusive emotionally and physically that program’s taped into their mind they’re constantly playing that makes it difficult for them to appropriate God’s love. That’s where God’s healing grace has to be at work.
There’s so much that could be said about this awesome topic—the love of God. And I decided I’d operate this morning on the principle that less is more. And we simply would look at this one verse --John 3:16. And we would break it down. Notice where it begins, "God so loved." Note the subject and the verb. Note that the initiator of the love, of the action, is God. That’s why John in his letter later on said, "We love because God first loved us." And as I was working on this message I asked myself the question, "God why in the world would you bother to love me?" Here’s the answer that came to me through the Holy Spirit. Why does God bother to love me and love you? Because it is God’s nature to love! It is his nature and desire to be in a relationship with the created order He brought into being. We bear God’s very nature as human beings. That nature has been marred by sin, but God in love wants to restore it. Those of you who have children, when you thought about bringing children in the world, did you think Shelley about how much it was going to cost you? Did you think about how many diapers you were going to have to change? Did you think about how many times when they were little they were going to step on your toes and then when they became teenagers how often they were going to trample on your hearts? You didn’t think about those things because the love was driving you to bring in to the world flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. "God so loved", now note the object, "the world."
And then here is where we begin to come face to face with the awesome nature of what we are talking about of the fact that the love that God has goes light years beyond our human understanding of love. For this verse doesn’t say that God so loved the church. It doesn’t say that God so loved good people. It doesn’t say that God so loved those who love Him back. This verse tells us that God loves a world that is terribly messed up, that is disobedient, and a world that constantly turns around and spits in God’s face. And God keeps loving the world any way.
Most of you know I’m addicted to diet coke. So I make my way down to Big Foot convenient store down at the interchange of 44 and 65 about three times a day to refill my Styrofoam cup. I’ve told people that if I die be sure to put my refilled cup in the casket. But you know, when you go in to a convenience store often, you see a whole gamut of humanity. And what I try to remind myself with the person in front of me in the line who probably is poor and doesn’t have much money but they’re wasting it on their cigarettes and their lottery tickets, I try to say to myself, "You know, God loves that person as much as God loves me." But if that person were the only person in the world, God would still have gone to the cross to die for them.
"God so loved the world that He gave." The very nature of love is to give. You’ve heard me use this quote, "You can give without loving, but you can not love without giving." When I spoke earlier about the critical importance of the next nine months for the future of Grace Church, on the horizon are three major events. The first will take place in September—it’s our General Fund Campaign. And, friends, I need to say it to you honestly; it does us no good next year to raise a million dollars in the Capital Campaign if we don’t first fully underwrite our operating budget. In November we’re going to implement a new ministry called the "Care Ministry". It’s going to take a hundred people to implement that ministry. And then next spring we’re going to launch in to a capital campaign. Those things are going to call us to respond in faith and in obedience to share of our time and our financial resources to help spread God’s love. But friends, any talk about love without sharing of our time and talents and treasure, they are just hallow, meaningless jargon. For when we talk about loving, we’re talking about sacrificial giving.
Allow me to share a humorous illustration from our own family this week. Our youngest son, Adam, who got married last October and his wife, Shanna, have had a full-grown dog, a beagle named Otis. Well, they decided about three weeks ago that Otis was lonely. And so they got an 8-week old puppy named Oscar. Now they both work outside the home. They’re discovering that puppies are different animals than full-grown, trained dogs. I hope it doesn’t discourage them from bringing grandchildren into the world for us. But we’re sitting there in the house on Wednesday evening and the phone rings. It’s Adam and he goes, "Mom, Dad we’re going to go out of town this weekend…" You know the rest. I turned to Mickey and I said, "Let’s don’t start down that road.." But if you were in our addition last night about 7:30 p.m., you would have seen Reverend Mike and Mickey walking Oscar and Otis. And this morning when I was getting ready to come to church I looked out the bedroom window and there is Mickey in her bathrobe taking out the water, the food. Cleaning up the you know what. Why? There’s nothing more important in the world to us than our two boys. There was nothing other than some inconvenience keeping us from watching Otis and Oscar. Now we like dogs, but we don’t love dogs. So we weren’t watching them because they were cute dogs. But we love our son; we love our daughter-in-law.
It’s the nature of love to give. And more often than not, friends, the measure of our giving to God is in direct proportion to the measure of our love for God. And God demonstrated that principle to us by what He gave—He gave His one and only son. Those of you who have children would echo my thoughts there when I say there is nothing more precious to us who are parents than our children. Tony, you’d die for that little boy there in your arms, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t think twice about it. And that fact is what makes God’s love so awesome. It’s what He gave. He gave His one and only son to die on the cross for you and for me. Why--because He loves us. Reflect in your mind how much you love your son or daughter. Or if you don’t have children, how much you love some special person in your life. And then multiply that countless times over and you’ll just begin to scratch the surface of how much God loves you! And the reason I think this message is so foundational to all that lies ahead, is that if we really begin to grasp the fact that God loves us, it changes everything. When temptation comes around I’ll choose not to give in because I don’t want to trample on the One who loves me that much. It changes my motivation for serving God. For friends, we don’t do good works in order to be saved. We do good works because we are saved.
And then it changes my motivation for giving. I came home one night this week. I was kind of tired; I was in a bad mood. We have had Mickey’s nieces, our nieces, this week. We never had any girls so Hanna and Stephanie have kind of become our daughters. They were over here for three days. It was Stephanie’s birthday on Friday. Well, Mickey, every time it’s one of their birthdays, she gets a present for the other one too. And as we were going to bed, I said, "Honey, isn’t that overdoing it a bit?" And when I was in a better frame of mind the next morning I said, "Honey, I apologize. It’s not overdoing it. It’s something you want to do because of how much you love them." You see in terms of our love for Hanna and Stephanie, it’s not how little that we do and get by with it; it’s always how much can we do to let them know we love them.
‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." God’s love is available to all but like any other gift it’s got to be received. Just because God loves me doesn’t automatically translate into my being with God in heaven some day. That’s God’s desire; that’s why He sent His son. But John 16 tells us, "Whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." I hope you are aware that so many of the ministries that we have begun at Grace in the last few years or hope to begin are so that others who do not yet know the love of God will come to know Him. The hymn writers have always done it best in terms of trying to describe what our limited human understanding makes it impossible for us to fathom. Fredrick Raymond described the love of God this way in the versus of this great hymn. Listen carefully.
Could we with ink the ocean fill
And were the skies of parchment made
Were every stalk on earth a quill
And every man a scribe by trade
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry
Nor could the scroll contain the whole
Though stretched from sky to sky
Oh love of God how rich and pure
How measureless and strong
It shall for evermore endure
The Saints (that’s you and me) and the angels’ song
One of the great German theologians was asked on his deathbed, this man who had read thousands of pages about God, to summarize the greatest truth he had ever learned. His answer was the words of our song this morning of response. He simply said, "Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so." Sing it as if you mean it. Let us stand.
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